Former NFL punter Kasey Redfern has died at 35, South Carolina officials confirmed, after years of treatment for a brain tumor his family made public.

Breitbart News reported that Jonathan Lawson, chief investigator with the Spartanburg County Coroner’s Office, said Redfern has passed away. Officials have not yet released details on the death.

Redfern reached the NFL out of Wofford College and joined the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2014. Over four seasons he also played for the Chargers, Panthers, Browns, Lions, Cowboys, and Falcons.

His wife, Lauryl Redfern, had already prepared family and friends for the end. On Facebook she wrote that “the love of my life” had made a “move toward hospice care.”

A GoFundMe campaign started in 2023 first made the illness public. It revealed that Kasey had a brain tumor, later identified as CNS lymphoma in the brain. He spent the next three and a half years in treatment.

Sudden losses of young athletes keep hitting communities hard, much like the mourning that followed when Columbine freshman football player Noah Vesich died at 16.

Lauryl described a sharp slide in her husband’s final weeks. Falls. Extreme short-term memory loss. Random vomiting. She tied the symptoms to the toll of the treatments themselves.

“It seems that everything he’s been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, the falls, extreme decline in short-term memory, random throwing up, and some other things- is likely due to cognitive decline caused by neurotoxicity from all of the treatments he’s had over the last 3.5 years,”

She added a plain goal for what remained of his care.

“His poor brain has had all it can take treatment wise so we want to make sure that he can be as comfortable as possible,”

Sports fans have watched this pattern before, the early exit of a competitor still in his prime, the same grief that surrounded the killing of two-division boxing champion Zolani Tete at 38.

Redfern never became a household name. Punters rarely do. Yet he earned roster spots across seven franchises and lived the short, grinding career most special-teamers know. The league moves on fast. Families do not.

Lauryl framed the approaching end in faith, not bitterness. She told followers she could meet the loss with thanks if it came.

“makes it to Heaven soon, he will have it better than the rest of us and for that all I can do is be thankful and joyful and filled with peace (and a lot of jealousy) that He will be WHOLE and in glory with our Savior, the best place we could ask to be.”

Public mourning has followed other abrupt goodbyes this year, including the shock after Englewood’s mayor pro tem Joe Anderson died on a Colorado mountain hike.

South Carolina officials have confirmed only the death itself. The coroner’s office has not issued a formal cause or manner. The record so far rests on Lawson’s report and on the medical history Lauryl and the 2023 fundraiser already laid out: a brain tumor, years of aggressive treatment, cognitive collapse, and hospice.

Entertainment and sports alike keep losing people far too early, a reminder felt again when Drag Race composer Lucian Piane died at 46 after a car strike in Glendale.

Redfern was 35. He left a wife who spoke of heaven without apology and a career that began at a small South Carolina college and touched seven NFL cities. The full medical file may still come. The family’s account is already clear: the treatments that fought the cancer finally exhausted the brain they were meant to save.

When a young husband’s fight ends, faith and family remain the scoreboard that actually counts.